Hi Junio, On Mon, 9 Jan 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote: > IOW, "give an escape hatch to override auto-detected tortoiseplink and > plink variables" suggestion should be taken as an "in addition to" > suggestion (as opposed to an "instead of" suggestion). I was not clear > in my very first message, and I thought in my second and my third > message I clarified it as such, but probably I wasn't explicit enough. While you may not have been explicit enough, I was not smart enough. That escape-hatch exists *already*. And it is exactly the thing that you mentioned earlier as a potential source of mis-identification. Let's assume that you want to use a script for the GIT_SSH_COMMAND that eventually uses PuTTY, and you call this script "junio-is-a-superstar.sh". All plausible so far ;-) Now, with the patch in question (without the follow-up, which I would like to ask you to ignore, just like you did so far), Git would not figure out that your script calls PuTTY eventually. The work-around? Easy: DUMMY=/plink.exe /path/to/junio-is-a-superstar.sh In other words: the thing that we thought may be a problem is actually a feature. Likewise, if your GIT_SSH_COMMAND looks like this: THIS_IS_NOT_ACTUALLY_PUTTY=/my/window/needs/putty my-ssh.sh ... you can easily change Git's mind by prefixing DUMMY=blubber If you want to use a script that decides itself whether to call OpenSSH or PuTTY, Git should "stay dumb" about it, as it will not be able to tell beforehand whether a port argument should be passed via `-p` or `-P` anyway. Of course, given our discussion I think all of this should be documented in the commit message as well as in the man page. Do you agree this is a good direction to take? Ciao, Johannes